Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-9, an act to amend the Environmental Assessment Act.
As we look at this first group of motions at report stage, it is useful to provide a bit of background to the bill that came about as a result of the requirements of the mandatory statutory review requirements set out in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act that was proclaimed 11 years ago and came into force in January 1995.
A section of the current act required that the minister responsible for the environment undertake a comprehensive review of the provisions and operation of the act five years after its coming into force. It also and required that within one year after the review, the minister submit a report on the review to Parliament, including a statement of any recommended changes.
Discussions and consultations took place between December 1999 through March 2000, and the precursor to this bill was tabled a couple of years ago.
At the outset the review was fundamentally flawed. We felt that the minister's report failed to address significant deficiencies revealed over the five year history of the Environmental Assessment Act and we initially opposed the bill based on the assertion that it did fail to address three principal criteria.
First, the current Environmental Assessment Act did not go sufficiently far enough to protect our environment and the changes proposed in Bill C-9, in our opinion, would weaken the legislation additionally.
Second, the legislation before us attempted to streamline and speed up the environmental assessment and review process but we felt seemingly to the primary benefit of developers and industry instead of protecting the environment and the public.
Third, the bill did not substantively address the measures needed to strengthen and improve safeguards to protect our fragile environment.
During debate on the bill and throughout committee hearings, my colleague, the member for Windsor—St. Clair, raised these and many other concerns regarding the lack of effectiveness, the lack of transparency and the inefficiency in the environmental assessment process. After reviewing the legislation and consulting with a variety of environmental, aboriginal and legal experts, that member submitted more than 50 amendments to Bill C-9 at the committee stage. The amendments attempted to redress some of the shortcomings that we had identified in the act. Most of those amendments were defeated and the bill that has returned from committee and is before us this afternoon has failed to address those concerns. They included predictability and timeliness for all participants in the process. It also failed to address enhancing the quality of assessments and ensuring more meaningful public participation.
Although the bill and the amendments partially address some of the concerns relating to the efficiency of the process, it is unclear to us how the effectiveness or transparency of the environmental assessment process will be improved through this legislation.
Many groups and individuals commented on the need to review the entire environmental assessment process. In fact, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, in its submission to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, commented on the need for review of the entire process and not simply to limit the scope to amendments made in the bill. It stated:
--in its current form, CEAA will continue to be applied to fewer projects, with little or no opportunity for meaningful public involvement.
While Bill C-9 attempts to address some of the glaring inadequacies of the Environmental Assessment Act, it does not specifically address the shortcomings of the process.
While we would agree that there are some recommendations and issues within the report that we support in principle, we are unable to endorse the complete document because it fails to address the concerns that were laid out so clearly at the committee stage by the member for Windsor—St. Clair.
Unfortunately, the final report has been watered down over the course of numerous revisions. It appears that many of the concessions made during the drafting of the report were aimed at appeasing the Privy Council and the Prime Minister's Office instead of forcefully addressing the inadequacies of the environmental assessment process. We maintain that the changes proposed in the bill and report will move environmental assessment toward the lowest common denominator, much as our free trade agreements have done in other areas.
It is also regrettable that the report, which contains some strong wording in the text, lacks similarly forceful wording within its recommendations. The recommendations are just that and there is nothing compelling the government to actually act upon them.
As indicated earlier, one of our principal concerns was with the streamlining or harmonization of the environmental assessment process. Our concerns about harmonization seem to have been justified as the report includes section 1.3 which cites a provincial and federal harmonization agreement as an example of addressing the issues of co-operation, uncertainty and duplication of effort.
In fact, when we attempted to introduce amendments to create a greater certainty and less duplication of effort, they were defeated by members opposite at the committee stage.
The committee did hear considerable evidence to suggest that the federal environmental assessment is indeed not “making a significant contribution to sustainable development”. The report, however, contains no meaningful recommendations for immediate changes to the process or for ensuring that changing the process would be given the highest priority in any subsequent review of the act.
Another instance of where we dissent from the findings of the report is in section 2.3 which states:
--the Committee felt that the goals of Bill C-9 were laudable, and that the bill should improve CEAA and federal EA as a whole.
We remain skeptical and unconvinced that the bill will make meaningful improvements to the stated objectives in the process. In fact, the bill does not even address adequately the three goals outlined by the minister when it was first introduced.
Another area where we disagree is in section 2.8 which states:
This report examines areas where the current federal approach has not succeeded, sets out a number of important challenges that remain to be addressed, and provides recommendations on what should be done. The report deals with the basic questions. In short, how can the federal EA process be improved to better meet the goals of sustainable development?
The report does not deal with the entire environmental assessment process and meeting the goals of sustainable development. Nothing in the report or the bill provides consequential reassurances that deficiencies within the Environmental Assessment Act and process will be remedied.
Throughout the examination of Bill C-9 the committee heard witnesses discuss problems with self-assessments, the failure of the regulatory authority to trigger an environmental assessment in a timely fashion and the lack of meaningful, timely public participation. These problems are not addressed adequately in the bill nor in the recommendations contained in the report. The report also lacks meaningful recommendations requiring enforcement or oversight mechanisms to ensure that federal authorities comply with the act.
These are just some illustrations of how we feel the report and the bill fail to deal with Canadians' stated concerns on our fragile environment.
It is disappointing that so much time and hard work has been dedicated to such a meagre piece of legislation as we see before us. The committee heard from numerous witnesses on the need to simplify the process. In the final analysis, Bill C-9 does little to meet these objectives and Canadians are left with a complex, confusing and basically inaccessible piece of legislation. Given the shortcomings of the act and the amending legislation, we recommend that an entirely new Environmental Assessment Act be introduced, an act that would create an environmental assessment process that would be efficient and allow for public participation.
We oppose this. Unfortunately and regrettably we have to stand in opposition to it. In conclusion I would simply say that we cannot support Bill C-9 or the recommendations of the report of the standing committee. We in this caucus would say that we need to leave a much softer footprint on our fragile environment. We did not simply inherit this planet from our ancestors. We are preserving it for our children and their children, and in that vein we are in opposition to Bill C-9.